socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque

i never know
when i'm going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i've got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course

my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i'm at war with myself…

A Cult of Nowness

The fragment above was forged using notes scrawled onto seven sides
of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at night
following an evening's carousal and in a state of serene
intoxication. The original notes were based on experiences I
underwent while serving as a teacher in a highly successful central
London school of English, which I did between the spring or summer
of '88 and the summer of 1990.
It gives some indication of my emotional condition at the time,
including a tendency as I see it to wildly veer between the
conscious effusive affectionateness I aspired to, and sudden
irrational involuntary lapses of affect. It also bespeaks the
intense devotion I manifested towards my favourite students and
which was reciprocated by them with interest.
All punctuation has been removed and extracts from the notes have
been tacked together not randomly as in the so-called cut up
technique but selectively and all but sequentially.

It was written towards the end of the 1980s, a decade which I see
as the last in a triad of decades marked in the West by frenzied
persistent social upheaval and artistic innovation, the latter
taking place in particular within two late modern forms of creative
expression in the shape of the cinema and rock music.
For me the last-named, and I am not alone in believing this, is
more than just a simple type of popular music derived from rythym
and blues, country music and so on. Rather it is an immensely
influential international subculture of varying artistic and
intellectual substance, much of it depictable as pure "pop", which
could be used as an abbreviation of popular rock. Some cultural
critics have even gone so far as to describe it as a
religion.

What is certain is that rock has possessed an intellectual
dimension since the 1960s, and many would single the one-time folk
troubadour Bob Dylan out as the person who more than any other
helped to invest mere pop music with genuine artistic and
intellectual substance. From Dylan onwards there have been rock
artists who've looked to past movements within the sphere of
artistic modernism for inspiration, such as romanticism, symbolism,
dadaism, surrealism, beat, situationism, and so on, as well as the
zeitgeists which birthed them. In my opinion this was especially
true of certain pioneers of the music of the 1970s and early
'80s.
It could be said that rock has been the principle repository of the
avant garde impulse in the West since the late sixties, with its
attendant rebelliousness and negativity. However, it would be false
to insist that it has been uniformly negative, when much of it has
been positive and uplifting, as well as artistically exalted. Still
the fact remains that rock has helped to disseminate a culture of
instant gratification throughout the Western World in the last
fifty years thereby significantly contributing to the alteration of
its moral fabric.

Those who like myself were born in the mid 1950s, and so grew up in
the sixties, were of necessity affected on a deep and perhaps
largely subliminal level by the post-war socio-cultural revolution
of which rock was such an essential component. Some were more
profoundly and negatively impacted than others, and I would
consider myself among them. I maintain that from quitting formal
education aged 16 to coming to faith some two decades thereafter, I
was in thrall to a cult of "nowness" or instantaneity that has been
growing progressively more powerful throughout the west since about
1955.
If this were not so, why would I not have countenanced a future for
myself during those years? I mean in terms of establishing myself
within a solid profession, starting a family, planning for middle
age and beyond, and so on? Retrospect informs me that prior to my
decision to forswear alcohol, I viewed these concerns with an
indifference bordering on contempt and it hurts me deeply to
realise the extent to which I sabotaged my life through such a
worldview. Sometimes it seems to me that the only way I can deal
with such bitter knowledge is to see myself as a success manqué,
viz. a social and professional misfit simply by default.
As an illustration of how psychologically and spiritually lost I
was in the late '80s and early '90s, permit me to quote from a
letter from my mother written to me in what I surmise to have been
the winter of 1991:

"…I had a chance to look at your library…I could not believe what I
saw. These very strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of
them, and I thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought
it right to read such matters…I feel very deeply that you have up
to your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling
face has left you, your humourous nature, ditto, your spirited
state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all
gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of
others (often those you can not help, in any way)…I've said
recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a
state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading
about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do is
to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them get
hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why, and
how?"

How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries have
asked this of offspring who've been inexplicably drawn to the
shadowlands of life only to lose their way back to sanity? Only God
knows. Most of course, succesfully make the journey back before
settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger of becoming
lost is always there, especially for those who remain in the
shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is arguably one
of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its exaltation of
youth .
I recently read of a legendary rock artist from the late seventies
and early eighties born like me in the mid 1950s and about whom
someone very close to him described as being obsessed by human
suffering, both mental and physical despite being well into his
twenties. His worldview, which also incorporated a preoccupation
with the dark glamour of self-destructive genius, I see as
remarkably akin to mine at the time I penned the words contained in
the first paragraph of this piece, or when my mother wrote her
impassioned letter to me, portions of which I quoted in the
previous paragraph.
I was a puer eternus in my mid-thirties at the time, in thrall to
the avant garde and its age-old love affair with antagonism and
nihilism. It had already wreaked serious psychological damage, and
physical and spiritual annihilation would surely have followed had
I not been violently wrenched from its Svengali-like influence in
time. This of course is precisely what occurred, thanks to the
mercy of God.

There are those who would insist that far fewer young people in the
late '00s are enthralled by the time-honoured avant gardist
exaltation of self-destructive genius than in previous rock eras.
How true this is it is difficult to say, but what is certain is
that the worldview still exists, and may be set to explode once
again, as it has done periodically since the late '60s by which
time the golden age of youth and pop and had started to reveal a
far more solemn visage with hard rock as its new soundtrack.
A year or so back, an angel-faced young rock idol announced with
apparent wistful regret that he'd destroyed beautiful things that
were his for the keeping. Again I was reminded of the person I was
a decade and a half ago, the eternal youth who romanticised
self-destruction. He couldn't be more different from today's Carl,
who treasures and honours the things he loves, which are to a
significant extent the simple things that nurture and sustain the
individual and society…

My Hot/Cold Torment (reprise)

…the catholic nurse all sensitive caring noticing everything what
can she think of my hot/cold torment always near blowing it living
in the fast lane so friendly kind the girls dewy eyed wanda
abandoned me bolton is in my hands and yet my coldness hurts the
more emotional they stay trying to find a reason for my ice-like
suspicion fish eyes coldly indifferent eyes suspect everything that
moves socialising just to be loud compensate for cold lack of
essential trust warmth i love them despite myself my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque I never know when I'm going to miss
someone strange coldness perplexing I've got to work to get
devotion but once I get it I really get people on my side there are
carl people who can survive my shark-like coldness and there are
those who want something more personal I can be very devoted to
those who can stay the course my soul is aching for an impartial
love of people I'm at war with myself the catholic nurse all
sensitive caring…